1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a presence-based communication system, and in particular, to providing web services through presence systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Presence-based interactive communication systems enable callees (presentities) to publish, in real-time, their presence information, such as the availability and current status of the callee devices/applications, to callers (presence watchers). Presence systems typically incorporate presence servers to manage the presence information for a plurality of presentities. In general, presence servers receive updated presence information from various presence sources, such as telephone applications or instant messaging applications, and aggregate the received presence information to reflect the presence state of the presentities. For example, when a presentity initiates or receives a voice call on his or her desktop phone, the presence server is notified and the presence state of the presentity is changed to “On the Phone.”
Presence servers further interface with presence user clients on watcher terminals to provide the current presence state of presentities to watchers of the presentities to assist the watchers in establishing real-time voice, text and/or multimedia communication sessions with the presentities. For example, a presence user client can include a graphical user interface for displaying the real-time presence information on the terminal in the form of icons and/or text strings. In addition, the graphical user interface may also include buttons that enable a user to invoke an action, such as initiating an instant message (IM) communication session or voice call with a presentity, using presentity contact information maintained by the presence user client and/or presence server.
However, current presence systems are not capable of providing access to various web services offered by presentities. For example, if a customer subscribes to the presence information of a company, the customer may want to access web services offered by the company through the presence user client. As an example, if the company is included on the customer's “Buddy List,” and while viewing the “Buddy List,” the customer realizes that he/she would like real-time information on the status of a service being performed by the company for the customer, the customer may want to “click on” a link to a customer service web page for the company. However, existing presence services only allow the customer to contact the company by e-mail, instant message or voice call. As a result, the customer would need to leave the “Buddy List,” log-on to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and either type in a URL or do a search for a URL to access the customer service web page of the company. Therefore, what is needed is the ability to provide presence-based web services.